Change of Pace

For the benefit of those who have never taken ginseng to treat fatigue, stress, diabetes, headaches, dizziness, colds, influenza, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, thinning hair, failing memory, tumours, diminished libido, allergies, inflammation, poor appetite, a logy immune system, various circulatory issues, and/or generalized feelings of dispiritedness, I will start by saying this: nothing smells quite like ginseng. I have heard the aroma described as a tannic potpourri of licorice root, cloves, sarsaparilla, and the budding seed of the anise flower. This may be true, though any aromatic composition would also have to include the sickly sweet putrescence that descends on a forest in the fall, after all the leaves have fallen, and it has rained for a week, and everything has turned mushy and black. I would also add that ginseng pretty much tastes like it smells.

For ginseng farmer Doug Bradley, however, describing the aroma of Ontario ginseng is easy: “The only thing that smells like ginseng is ginseng.” We are standing in his cavernous, aluminum-sided barn in Norfolk County, about an hour and a half southwest of Toronto. His hands are submerged in a barrel of dried ginseng. He pulls out a mound of the sand-coloured root and holds it to my nose; the smell is so concentrated and dry that it tickles the insides of my nasal passages. “You see?” he says. “You see how strong that scent is? Ontario is the only place where you find ginseng that potent.”

Bradley is a tall, avuncular man of fifty-six who laughs a lot, has three grown (or nearly grown) children, and wears a pair of hearing aids. Due to his hearing problem, he says, he has a tendency to mumble; I don’t notice this, though I do notice that he pronounces ginseng as “ginsen,” with the accent on the first syllable. After talking in his barn, we jump in his truck and drive well away from his farm to see some of the ginseng he is growing, a contradiction that bears explanation.

The first thing to know about ginseng, Bradley tells me, is that it does not grow in the same place twice. You plant it, it takes four years to come to maturity, and then you have to plant something else, or rent the land to another farmer who will do so. As ginseng farmers invest heavily in the equipment necessary to grow their crop, most opt for the latter. Bradley, for one, owns about eighty hectares of land, most of which he doesn’t farm. Meanwhile, the thirty-five or so hectares on which he farms ginseng all belong to others, who previously used that land to grow something else entirely.

Though it has been raining fiercely all morning, the sun has come out, blanketing the fields in a humid, bug-flecked haze. As we drive, I notice that the fields we pass are filled with the little wooden houses once used to dry tobacco leaf. Today the kilns are unused and falling prey to wood rot and infestation; many are leaning precariously. I can also see the emblems of Norfolk’s current bounty: the polypropylene shades that provide the mix of sunlight and darkness ginseng requires. At one patch — it looks to be about an acre or so — Bradley pulls over. This plot, he says, hosts a mixture of one-, two-, and three-year-old roots, which he will likely cultivate to maturity, unless of course the ginseng begins to show signs of die-off, meaning he will harvest it early and begrudgingly accept a lower yield.

“The other thing you should know about ginseng,” he tells me with a chuckle, “is that the moment you put it in the ground, it begins to look for ways to kill itself.” The root, he ex-plains, needs a climate with sufficient rain, and soil that drains quickly and easily; as growers like to say, “ginseng doesn’t like wet feet.” (The loamy soil of southwestern Ontario is perfect, just as it was for the cultivation of tobacco.) The plant also falls prey to numerous diseases and grub worms, and the rows in which it is planted need to be kept warm in winter with a padding of threshed straw. Finally, the instant ginseng is planted, it begins to generate a pathogen called cylindrocarpon; this slowly builds up in the soil, and by the fifth year will likely kill the plant. (Its presence in the earth, essentially harmless to other crops, is also the reason ginseng will almost never grow in the same place twice.) Among farmers, ginseng is a heartache crop, the rhizomal equivalent of Pinot Noir.

Ontario hosts about 2,400 hectares of cultivated Panax quinquefolius, or American ginseng, and that figure is rising every year. The current area yields about four million pounds of the fibrous root annually, making Ontario by far the biggest producer in the world of this strain of ginseng. The vast majority is shipped to China and Hong Kong, where it is either sold in whole roots, or ground up and manufactured into tea, candy, balms, creams, medicinal lozenges, capsules, unguents, herbal infusions, flavour additives, and bulk powders. (There is some ginseng grown in British Columbia, though it is regarded as poor in quality; and ginseng farmers in Wisconsin, once leaders in American ginseng production, are slowly being put out of business, partially due to Ontario’s high yields.)

The biggest problem associated with growing ginseng in Ontario today is the price paid by buyers, which has fallen precipitously in recent years — from a high of about $82 per pound in the mid-1980s to somewhere between $12 and $14 per pound today. The reason, Bradley told me, is that disreputable growers in China are passing off their much less valuable Chinese-grown Panax quinquefolius as the illustrious Ontario-grown. (Due to different climate conditions, the former doesn’t have the same taste or smell, and generally sells for 10 percent less.) This practice simultaneously increases supply and diminishes demand: Chinese producers sample imitation Ontario ginseng and conclude that they might as well use the less aromatic, and cheaper, homegrown variety.

This drop in price has prompted many Ontario ginseng farmers to get out of the business altogether; five years ago, about 300 were farming in Ontario’s former tobacco belt, whereas today there are about 200. Those that remain are planting more and more ginseng, given that a certain economy of scale is now necessary to make a real income. All of this has resulted in an irony not lost on people like Doug Bradley: fewer Ontario farmers are now growing far more ginseng in order to earn much less money.

Wild ginseng was first picked in the mountainous regions of northeastern China about 5,000 years ago. A Taoist principle says the appearance of things in nature suggest what purpose they serve. By this way of thinking, walnuts (wrinkly, hemispherical) are good for the brain, and feral boar tusks (rigid, phallus like) are an aphrodisiac. The ginseng root, meanwhile, was said to look like a little person — “ginseng” means, more or less, “image of man” in Cantonese — and was therefore viewed as a general tonic, said to cure whatever ails you. (To me, ginseng root looks more like a scrawnier, bark-ridden version of ginger, albeit with these little limb-like protuberances known as prongs.) Slowly, the ingestion of ginseng grew popular; the very first official Chinese pharmacopoeia, a sparse volume published over 2,000 years ago on paper made of mashed plant fibres, had this to say: “Ginseng soothes base emotions, safeguards the soul, drives out fear, expels evil influences, brightens the eye, opens up the heart, increases the spirit and, if taken over a long period of time, prolongs life.”